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situations continental philosophers have to completely translate someone like heidegger into analytic speak and then relate the translation to clear current problems in the analytic literature that s a lot of work and for what to get people who refuse to read heidegger obstinately it seems to accept that yes maybe heidegger had one good idea somewhere at least that s what it can look like and in light of this it isn t surprising that so many continental philosophers want to retreat into an echo chamber of textual exegesis why bother to explain something one might ask to people who seem to have no interest in what you re explaining and who certainly won t meet you halfway but expect you to come to them this isn t helped by the fact that some analytic philosophers though i think significantly fewer than one might expect are actively hostile to continental thought consider for example this missive on heidegger by simon blackburn who seems to have skimmed heidegger for the explicit purpose of criticizing him to balance things it may be worth noting that blackburn did something similar with regard to donald davidson though i m not sure how comparable that hatchet job is or perhaps even worse paul edwards s seemingly intentional misreading of heidegger there are few authors one can t perversely misread if one sets one s mind to it and if one s colleagues will praise rather than condemn one for doing so ugliest of all perhaps a blurb from j j c smart on the back of the edwards book claims that edwards explains clearly why those of us who are repelled by heidegger s style of philosophizing are right not to read him with garbage like this in the air a heidegger scholar might be excused for thinking that these here analytic fellows just aren t worth talking to thankfully much of that is old news and my sense though i could be wrong is that the sort of hostility evidenced by blackburn edwards and smart is significantly less common far more commonly i ve run into indifference incomprehension and even interest coupled with uncertainty about just how even if this stuff is interesting one could say something philosophical about it these attitudes are far more reasonable but so what why continental philosophers might ask is it worth doing all the work for these people well it is pretty common for continental philosophers to complain about being marginalized and consequently many will insist that the analytic continental divide a condition if not the only source of the marginalization needs to be done away with of course there is also another tendency a tendency to complain that analytics aren t doing real deep profound philosophy that sort of garbage exists on both sides of the divide and is usually backed up by a complete ignorance of what the other side has been doing for the past 10 100 years the divide clearly will not go away unless continental philosophers take analytic work seriously and vice versa now those on the continental side clearly have it in their power to start reading analytic work but just how would they get those on the analytic side to start reading continental work what short of complaining about how analytics are all closed minded throwbacks are they to do or to put it another way if you are a continental philosopher and you think analytic philosophers ought to be reading work from the continent just how do you imagine this might happen well it won t happen magically and it won t happen through attempts to shame analytic philosophers into wanting to learn more continental philosophy and the reason is simple the incentives to do so are very small given the way academic philosophy is structured and given that continental writing has a tendency to be impermeable without the proper background analytic philosophers even those who are not hostile to continental thought just have no real incentive to delve into it this isn t helped by the fact that if you are used to reading 20 page papers that make very clear points reading 400 page tomes that make rather nebulous points which are hard to pick out or explain in concrete terms is likely to be a hard sell several exceptionally good philosophers have told me with no condescension or hostility that they just can t make sense of heidegger if that situation is to change at all how that is how can the incentive structure be changed i doubt it can be changed first at the institutional level i e by restructuring departments to train students more broadly because that would require first changing the incentives of the people responsible for structuring departments so how to do that well one incentive to read work is that reading it and writing about it gets one published but that s not an incentive continental philosophers have much control over and it would take a sea change for this to become a relevant incentive writing on continental philosophy is among the surest ways at the moment to exclude oneself from publishing in most highly ranked journals another incentive is to convince people that they need to understand something because it can contribute to their work many philosophers are i think or like to think intellectually curious and intellectually honest at least to an extent and if they are convinced that reading something will help them think through a problem they are working on this will give them an incentive to read it think for example about what rawls and his students did for kant virtually nobody was reading kant at least in anything but an absurdly superficial way until rawls and his students showed that everyone even committed humeans simply has to read kant in order to make any sense of normativity and the special status of morality if there is such among other normative claims similarly telling people hey you should really read heidegger because he s soooooo deep isn t going to get them to read him it is more common for people to believe that this might work than you d expect especially i think among grad students and especially among grad students who are very into heidegger and this isn t meant as a condescending jab at all i certainly used to think like this even if they believe you they have a lot of other crap to read arranged in not so neat piles all over their desks floors and perhaps beds but if you show them how heidegger can speak to their own interests in their own words or at least words they can understand you have a shot at getting them to read him this is all pretty obvious i think so what s the point of bringing it up well the main point is simply this complaints that analytic philosophers need to just stop being mean to continental philosophy and start reading it are off the mark given existing incentive structures analytic philosophers are for the most part perfectly rational in not reading continental philosophy there are cautionary tales about going back and forth i jumped from largely continental to largely analytic reading at the dissertation stage and that s how i spent nine years in grad school boys and girls so railing at analytic philosophers and calling them names because they aren t running out to get a copy of being and time difference and repetition or oneself as another isn t just unproductive it s completely mistaken it assumes that if people aren t reading something you find important those people must be intentionally obstinate jerks determined to remain in the dark ages and perversely persecuting you and your favorite philosophers for being so enlightened but that s not it at all nobody can read every book out there and most people are going to read what they need to in order to make sense of the projects they are working on so why not try to explain to them why they should be working the projects you are interested in and if they don t understand a word coming out of your mouth instead of taking this as further proof of their inferior philosophical acumen why not take it as a sign that maybe you re not being quite as clear as an expert like yourself ought to be and that maybe that s something to work on continue reading at 11 40 pm 14 comments tuesday july 19 2011 why is so much continental philosophy so bad posted by roman altshuler given the recent discussions over at the new apps blog i want to briefly comment on a question in some ways at the heart of things why is so much continental philosophy so bad i think there are at least two reasons the first is sociological given the professional rift between analytic and continental philosophers and given that the dominant side of that rift has little interest in talking to the other often enough bashing it openly there is little incentive for continental philosophers to talk across the divide or to try to engage with the other side this is a shame it rests on the idea that philosophy consists of figures owned by sides so that the figures studied by the other side don t need to be read this is particularly ironic given the continental trope of emphasizing the significance of the other the refusal to speak across traditions undermines the idea of philosophy as universal instead seeing it as consisting of parochial local traditions i am still old school enough to think that although obviously much of what philosophers do addresses local parochial concerns good philosophy must aim to speak with a universal import when philosophers cannot make themselves understandable by other philosophers there is a breakdown when philosophers do not care about making themselves understandable by other philosophers they are no longer doing philosophy the sociological effect of the analytic continental divide is thus two fold on the one hand it leads analytic philosophers to ignore and feel fully content and justified in ignoring much of the philosophy produced on the continent over the last century or more on the other hand it lowers the quality of much work on that philosophy by eliminating the need to approach it clearly rigorously and critically the last part is especially important being critical means not simply finding the limits of someone s thought oh look there s an aporia how profound but also clearing away the chaff covering over the kernel of truth and bringing that kernel to fruition criticism involves a certain amount of disrespect a willingness to challenge some of a thinker s ideas as obvious bullshit in order to salvage what has genuine value i believe nietzsche once ridiculed philosophers for thinking that their systems would survive the test of time when in fact only the building bricks of those systems had any chance of making it it is crucial for thinkers immersed in say derrida to be able to find the core worth preserving and to be willing to ruthlessly excise the rest this leads to the second reason the 20 th century saw a deep skepticism about the system building of the early 19 th century but a key component of that system building remained in place to some extent and came back with a vengeance in heidegger and more importantly in the french philosophy of the 60s take kant it is now widely alleged that he invented the empiricist rationalist distinction cleaving philosophers with similar concerns and orientations into two distinct camps as a result of this reading of the history of philosophy kant could reconcile the two sides i am not of course implying that kant only solved or attempted to solve a problem of his own making but the reading of history was instrumental to framing the problem in the particular way that kant did thus idiosyncratically interpreting the history of philosophy became a centerpiece of system building with pernicious effects giving one s own interpretation of a history allows one to set one s own rules for doing philosophy to set up certain problems as central to invent a specialized terminology for addressing them to provide a foundation for further investigation kant clearly succeeded his vision of history and consequently his view of the central problems and his terminology if not his actual system pervaded western philosophy and became inextricable from it heidegger attempted something similar a reinterpretation of history that highlighted the question of being with somewhat more mixed results his terminology was adopted on much of the european continent but rejected by anglophone philosophers as excessive and nonsensical but the adoption in europe had serious effects in the 60s and after it began to seem as if every french philosopher was compelled to invent his or her own reading of history view of central problems and specialized vocabulary take a look for just one admirably clear example at latour s 1991 we have never been modern where he bolsters his network theory by you guessed it giving a selective reading of the history of western philosophy what is the result keep in mind that the entire point of giving one s own version of the history of philosophy is to foreground particular problems and to attempt to standardize a particular terminology two people from different traditions are unlikely to share a vocabulary or common views of key problems but the result of the french appropriation of especially later heidegger was just to create a distinct tradition as a bubble around every philosopher in a 2005 interview baudrillard said that there are no more french intellectuals what you call french intellectuals have been destroyed by the media they talk on television they talk to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves his view is no doubt clearer than mine but it is an interesting development to my mind we cannot overlook the importance of the following fact the vast majority of french intellectuals philosophers in particular attended a single institution of higher learning the école normale supérieure imagine if the only people for whom you wrote to whom you hoped to make your thinking clear had virtually the same education as you the same teachers the same readings of history of philosophy the result would be that you would belong to a group that had its own tradition separated by terminological and other gulfs from other traditions that nevertheless shared the same history in the sense of the same objective set of historical references but then imagine if part of this tradition was that each member of it were to go their own way by reinterpreting the history in their own idiosyncratic way against an already idiosyncratic background each would construct in effect their own tradition it is not only the media in other words that is responsible for french intellectuals not talking to each other as baudrillard suggested it is the fact that in a real sense when a group of individuals each have their own sense of tradition their own terminology and their own central concerns there is a sense in which they cannot talk to each other though of course their readings of history their traditions are likely to have enough of a family resemblance to allow for a fair bit of communication at times and talking to anyone outside ...